All the mini-reviews of the Twine game Taghairm have been like this: 'Taghairm – it's the game for people who don't like cats!'
Well, I hadn't played Taghairm yet, I hadn't even met it, but I was starting to develop a manic pissed-off response to this repeated consumer advice. Don't tell me I can't enter into some fiction, presumably about maiming cats, just because I like cats!
After the teenaged part of my brain stuck its middle finger up at all those reviews, I went off to play Taghairm.
An all-spoiler review follows, and incidentally, it contains no user help about what a 'Taghairm' even is. I'm guessing enough other reviewers will have covered that by now.
Taghairm was an interesting experience with several distinct phases. First, high interest, laughter and nausea as I began to skewer and roast cats. Then, tedium, as this was going on for a long time. The duration was obviously intentional, as the characters just kept up the cat-skewering while ignoring their hunger and fatigue pains for reasons that were apparently clear to them. The tedium did not really abate the sizzly audio-enhanced nausea, a strength in a game which was obviously trying to convey how long and tedious and nauseating this process must be.
I expected that this was all headed somewhere, and the glimpses of increasingly supernatural events happening on the periphery of the scene signalled that I should trust that it was, but ultimately I fell into a meta-annoyance at just having to cast myself onto the raw machinery of Twine repeatedly. Waiting for text to appear when I didn't want to wait. At other times, having a text flash by before I could read it. Watching for changes in the text while racing through all non-changing text. Plotting the shortest mouse route through the pattern of links to just keep this process ticking over.
This game prompted me to dwell on my thoughts on 'conveying how long and tedious and nauseating this process must be'. In the videogame medium in particular, authors have come up with all kinds of ways to inflict temporal gruel on the player. There are usually elements of repetition, gameplay difficulty and deliberate irritation involved. Balances are struck or aimed for, and the outcomes fall somewhere on a spectrum of diegetic and non-diegetic gruel experienced by the player. The sum of these gruels becomes the subjective experience of the player. The player might just feel it transparently, or they might consciously attribute it to some mix of the diegetic and the non-diegetic: the pre-interactive game content which is trying to impart the experience of gruel, and the mechanical-interactive elements which are promoting gruel by being tedious, repetitive, challenging, etc. And ultimately, if the player's reaction is more conscious than unconscious, they'll decide how they feel about what the author has been trying to do. The gruel might seem to be an admirable trick perfectly encapsulating the real gruel of a particular experience, or it might just come across as unengaging, deliberate annoyance. Or somewhere inbetween – these binaries are always rhetorical, of course.
As a player, I'm always fascinated to try to work out why I like or dislike particular takes on interactive vexation. As an author, I'm quite sure that it's always living more dangerously than usual to wield it, at least in terms of being able to herd player response as successfully as usual. (Which is to say – as successfully as I can herd non-roasted cats.)
When Taghairm ended, I felt the catharsis of having summoned the great demon cat. This somewhat ameliorated my text-click fever, but not entirely. When it comes to temporal works like films and games, a good ending (aesthetically / emotionally good, not necessarily 'happy') can lift or transform the audience's whole experience in retrospect, which is a very powerful tool for an author. But in the case of Taghairm, I was too conscious of the mechanical aspects of the gruel. Some of these I attribute to the medium of Twine in general. It provides a means of delivering text interactions with a strong temporal emphasis, but my growing belief is that the temporal elements are used mostly at the player's expense. I had similar problems in the same domain of The Insect Massacre – the unskippable repeating text, the enforced time delays. In the end, they all just got in the way of playing, reading, interacting.
In reading per se, the world acknowledges that people's reading speed varies massively. Mine is slow. The first time Lauchlin pulled a cat out of a bag in Taghairm, I didn't have time to grasp the presentation quickly enough to read the cat's description before the screen changed. I oppose this mechanism. I want to be asked to hit space or to click something. If a human reads prose, the speed is set to speech, the fundamental human communication. If a machine reads prose, the user can set the speed. If I'm expected to read the text myself, I want to have as much time to read it as I need. And then I want to spend as little time as possible re-reading repeated information. Twine games can fight the player on both fronts, and I think too many do.
The other half of my reaction to Taghairm's cat-killing gruel was my experience of its prose. The author's choice is to repeat the central node verbatim, but to vary the cats' one-line descriptions and to stud the timeline with small character or supernatural moments. That is a way to do it, but all the time around that was spent shunting through the Twine mechanics I've complained about. In a shorter work I'd probably still have been OK with that, but I grew non-diegetically irritated here. And being that this was a horror game about skewering cats to summon a demon, I'm not motivated to pay off meta-tiredness. I'm motivated to pay off the horror, inseparable from the whole piece of course, and I did find the atmosphere to be vivid.
* PS My mini-rant about other capsule reviews of this game reminded me of a line from Leonard Maltin's review of the film Young Einstein (1988): '... though any movie with "cat pies" can't be all bad.' I have a lot of lines from reviews in Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guides permanently available in my head.
Heh. Sorry about that. I suppose I was trying to spare people from having the experience that I did: firing up something I thought was going to be a short but reasonably conventional horror-story Twine (maybe more like the author's new piece Tailypo) -- and finding that instead it was this complicity-tester. And worse! One where even if I indicated I was not up for slaughtering cats, nonetheless there was cat-slaughter in my presence. I felt that was gratuitously unpleasant and I was initially not even sure whether the author was intending to give the judges a bad experience. Admittedly as far as I can tell I tend to visualize scenes in more detail than some people, so maybe my mental rendition of this was more lurid than most. But I just wanted to stop, and even when I went back to replay with the intention of seeing the "real" ending, I couldn't bring myself to spit more than a couple of the creatures before thinking, "you know what? I don't actually owe it to Chandler Groover to do this." And quit again.
ReplyDeleteI have no confusion about where you're coming from! I feel I'm definitely in a minority in my approach to games like this.
ReplyDeleteLooking at others' comments on this one, everyone's coy and on eggshells and issuing warnings. But my thought process is – right, this historical Scottish cat-grilling ritual sounds bizarre and I'm I'm keen to get into this story about it. Like a lot of horror fans, I expect and want certain kinds of gratuitousness in horror contexts. Things that are broadly considered unacceptable or hidden or weird or distasteful or irrational can be shown and experienced safely in horror. Subjecting them to my personal moral or taste leanings in advance rarely occurs to me. If a moral universe comes up, I'll perceive it in the context of the piece. In this game, I was a character roasting cats in another time and place to summon a demon, because I at least half believed it would work, so as stinky and foul as it was, I wanted to see it through.
See, I feel like complicity-tester is way too reductive a term to describe this thing that took me vividly to Taghairm. But I think you and I differ totally in me having some macabre gene where it never occurred to me that a game about extended cat slaughtering might be trying to troll judges. I thought, 'Here's a pretty extreme horror game.' I'm aware that people have found this weird about me in a broad fiction context. But when I'm around people who also watch tons of horror films and are interested in every single one, then suddenly I'm home, after a fashion.
Now I'm slightly anticipating my own review of this game, but I think that might have worked for me in the way you describe if the story had had more setup, more of a sense of a place and time and a character motivation for these characters to do this. (And I hadn't, e.g., previously looked up Taghairm or read any reviews, so I went into the experience totally cold -- there was no "let's get into this historical Scottish cat-grilling ritual" because I didn't know that was what it was.)
DeleteIf there had been more background, maybe I could have immersed myself in the characters' need for roasted cats, or been horrified by it, or been challenged by the distance between their world view and my own (as I was with Warbler's Nest). But as it is, there's very little preamble, just "Inventory: sacks of cats, a skewer. >WHAT NOW?"
And with nothing to motivate me or transport me into the fiction, that was still too close to asking what I, Emily, would do in this situation. I did sort of see how someone else might regard this as grotesquely funny as opposed to just grotesque, but it didn't read that way for me.
Yuck. If I could take back playing this "game" I would. I must admit I wasn't going to, then decided to see what the fuss was about. The first time I let the cats go which quickly ends the game.
ReplyDeleteThe second time I turned the sound off, didn't read the continuously repeating text and went on a click marathon. Part way through I actually looked up another review to see if the game was just trolling to see how many "virtual cats" you could bring yourself to butcher before giving up. Apparently there was an ending so I decided to see what could motivate the characters in this story to do something so horrible, especially since there's text in there about how they don't seem to be enjoying it. You see, you know nothing about the background of these two people or why they're doing what they are. It's very hard to feel anything for them at all. You get to the end.....
S
P
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......and there's the summoned spirit cat. End of story. No explanation. No epilogue. No nothing.
Although based on a something that was apparently done, I found the whole thing distasteful and badly written. Harsh I know, but what would bring someone to write something like this, who's only purpose seems to be seeing if people are willing to continue to kill animals horribly over and over (albeit virtual ones, but it's still in very bad taste) with no apparent reason given? It doesn't seem like the characters are supposed to be completely insane or have zero emotional/moral compass as they seem to be reconsidering what they're doing at the start. They presumably have a reason to do something this terrible but it's not given. 1* (Zero if I could).
My recommendation is for everyone to avoid this "game". There are few who would find it in the slightest bit entertaining. It's not even well written enough for fans of horror or gore to appreciate- they'll probably just find it tedious.
Hi anon. I certainly don't disagree on the tedium, which was the main topic of my review.
ReplyDeleteI think the prose that's in the game is well written, but the fact that it's mostly unchanging and repeated scores of times can be argued to sum up to bad writing. In theory, C Groover could have written unique descriptions of each act. But that would be a much bigger commitment to the idea of this game (for questionable gain) which it seems hardly anyone is tolerating anyway.
I don't think I want to know exactly why these guys want to summon the demon. I mean, I like imagining what they want to achieve that they're prepared to do what they do, and it's a good piece of abstraction when this demon finally appears. Being told why they wanted to do this, especially at the outset, might have made it all seem pat to me, but that's assuming everything else about the game stayed the same as well.
The game that is is definitely about the grisly tedium of performing this ceremony, and not much outside it. I imagine if I was making this game and I was interested in what the two guys wanted, and what happened with the demon after they summoned it, I would still do the grisliness of the ceremony, but I'd spend about 1/30th as much time on it as this game did. It would simply be a different game. I view this one as throwing all its eggs into one mutually exclusive and extreme basket.
True, I guess what actually has been written is not terrible exactly, but in my opinion is isn't well witten over all and is definately lazy. If you care nothing for the people in the story, it hasn't been set up well writing wise.
DeleteI take your point about it being more work to write in different text but it basically amounted to: take a "random text" cat. Put on skewer. Watch it burn. Partner in crime takes a "random text" cat, Put on skewer. Watch it burn. Take a cat with a bell. Oh dear, can't bear to put that one on the fire? That's ok. Your friend will BBQ it for you. Rinse and repeat.
To me that's as tedious as you can get given the subject matter. Regardless of what the author was trying to get across, I can't imagine sitting around shoving live cats onto sharp pieces of metal and then hearing them scream as they die, would get tedious no matter how long the event went on for and how tired you got, unless the person doing the ceremony had some serious psychological issues.
In a way I'm thankful there wasn't more text to read, the whole thing actually made me feel sick as it is and I really do regret reading it. I'll stay away from anything written by this author in the future. There was little description but just the thought of what they thought was acceptable to portray is completely abhorrent to me as a "game". If it was written with a different sort of story line I would have just found it boring.
I can see what you mean about it only being about the ceremony, to be honest the only way this could have been even slightly redeemed in my mind was some sort of moral dilemma. ie: Maybe their family/friends/etc were captured and were going to be sacrificed to dark magic and the only option they had was to get in first with their own demon? Could you sit by and watch your family die or would you get involved in some very black magic to potentially save them and at what cost? Still wouldn't have been my cup of tea and I probably wouldn't have liked it, but would have made it more than a animal killing fest done for no particular reason the reader is aware of. It seems like it was probably made only for the shock value only since there's really no other story line to speak of, or anything else that could possibly make anyone like it.
Anyway I know it takes all types and everyone's entitled to their own thoughts and views which are all valid. To be honest, I guess I wanted to warn anyone thinking about playing the game that this is all there is to it. If you don't enjoy the first few lines, there's no point in continuing to the end trying to find some sort of meaning that isn't there.